Wisdombox

Digital payments and cashless society

We, the social beings of the modern society have a tendency of taking things for granted. Like most things, we have taken technological advancements in the society for granted. Without spending enough time on understanding the long term consequences of these advancements or the philosophies underpinning the evolution.

Fernando Montoro, a friend, philosopher and guide, takes us on a journey from barter to bitcoin. However, this particular podcast episode centres around digital payment systems. We discuss the societal impact of digital payment systems. Some countries are well set to go completely cashless within a decade. What impact would that leave on the society? Would that be fair to every strata of society? We also discuss in lights of the current conditions if some economies are well placed than others to go cashless.

What do you do if you find yourself in a foreign land with a pocket full of cash but no one accepting anything but digital payments? With such interesting stories from our personal experiences, this episode was full of wisdom, knowledge and fun facts. Hope you enjoy it.

Online dating – flame of lust or love

If you were born before the 90’s, chances are that you met your partner in high school, a coffee shop, through a friend or on a trip. But gone are those days when you had to gain enough courage to present yourself in front of your crush, when you had to meet them in a park, or in the theater. People now a days meet with their potential life partners online, from literally anywhere in the world.

Online dating is a social culture, especially for the new age millennials. I personally haven’t used dating platforms. But I sat down with two of my friends who did. We recorded our conversation in the form of a podcast (embedded below) where we discuss aspects like:

Do these dating platforms open the world to you to choose your special one?
Does online dating make it any easier for introverts or shy people?
About people’s vulnerabilities to cons, frauds and heartbreaks.
Ability for people to talk about their depression and mental health while maintaining enough anonymity, without the fear of being judged?
Can online dating help you find your lifetime partner?

Hope you enjoyed the episode.

Trust – a social fabric

Preface – Smart contracts and decentralization

One of the fundamental ideologies of a blockchain ecosystem is “trust”, rather “trustless”(ness). With smart contracts, a block of code would have the ability to run automatically setting the terms of a “contract” as per protocol, and would immutably persisted in the blockchain. In this post, I am going to jot down my thoughts about trust in general and how it is a building block of the society we live in, and discuss the same in the light of a decentralized system (I use the terms system, framework and architecture interchangeably).

Trust and the society

Trust is a social construct that (atomically) occurs between two parties. As the human species has evolved, we have perfected ourselves in taking things for granted. Our day to day activities are reliant on multiple factors. Our regular morning routine (of working out) in the gym is based on a trust system that it would open in time. Putting efforts for an assignment or a piece of work is based on a trust system between two parties. One party trusts the other to finish the piece of work according to the accepted standards (sometimes documented in the form of a contract, and sometimes inherently accepted, based on the nature of work). Another party trusts the other party to do the right thing by recognizing the finished work (in the form of payment or other wise depending on the nature of work again). Now what happens if one of the parties doesn’t keep their end of the deal or one of the parties feels cheated or betrayed by the other? Good news to the attorneys – they get to make some bucks. Even this is a form of trust that the attorney is going to project your end of the story in the court of law in exchange of a remuneration. Trust, again!

It all starts with an intention – an individual’s intention to achieve a goal, and another’s intention to contribute towards it and gain something out of it. Now, knowing ourselves, our intentions are not always the purest, and sometimes, the conditions of a trust system may end up being unfair to one of the parties (due to unforeseen circumstances). In an effort to create a fair society, we have built a social system – the concept of contracts (where agreements and conditions would be documented), protocols to be followed that leads the intentions of the parties to fruition, and the court of law to settle matters of injustice. Despite all the efforts, more often than not, we end up in turmoils that causes great pain and agony.

Are smart contracts really “trustless”?

The truth is, we are the most selfish species known to us. Our inherent inability to follow protocols (and trying to game the system to work in our favor) has led us to the need of a new system – that we called “trustless”. It’s funny, how much trust we put into trustless systems, in this case, a decentralized framework with smart contracts. A million things could go wrong.

A bug may lead to an undesired result.
There is still a possibility that it would be used to serve malicious intentions of a particular someone or a group.
The power that a minority of the community are gaining over significant majority, is essentially “re-allocation in institutionalised trust, from reliance on traditional ‘trusted third parties’ to a system of code and powerful actors within this system.” ¹
Interpersonal trust may be lost – a core element of modern society.

So, are smart contracts really trustless? A short answer is “not yet”. But, I trust (I am having fun writing this) with time, the system would refine.

Finally, some words in favor

Now, I am not a sceptic, or there is no ulterior motive behind this post. In fact, I am bullish on the ideology behind a decentralized framework. Fundamentally, I believe in goodness in the human race. However, if stats are to be believed, there is a very high probability that a selected few from this same race would try to rig the system. I believe, the smart contracts and the decentralized architecture would need years of refinement before they are put to use that address societal needs. The beauty of the decentralized frameworks lie in the design. At any point, the community may create a hard fork (in cases of a breach) and move everything till the point in time snapshot when the event (breach) happened with marginal impact. But, that also means that we put our trust back in the same questionable societal system.

Trust is a social fabric of our society and there is no society without it.

Get paid for paying attention

How many times have you been irritated by spam emails and random ad campaign in your inbox when you open your email? Almost often, right? Or think of a time when you are consumed in a piece of content on a website and you get interrupted by an ad banner selling you things that you don’t necessarily care about at the moment. If malwares and targeted ads (without proper context) have a special place in your list of dislikes, you are not alone.

But, advertisements don’t have to be irritating, repulsive or intrusive. A good piece of recommendation often helps. But unsolicited recommendation is a turnoff for most of us. The problem is not in the ad itself. In order to understand the problem, you have to listen to a story.

The story of advertising

Humans have been advertising in some form since the beginning of time. The truth is we advertise more often than we think. It might not be apparent all the time, but very often our actions are driven by our subconscious. Think about when you recommend your favourite restaurant to your friend. Would your friend be irritated by the recommendation? Most likely not. Yet, you actually shared (and advertised unconsciously) about the great experience you have had. On the other hand, imagine you calling the same friend at the middle of a busy day telling him about your experience of eating in the restaurant last night. Do you imagine the friend will be as receptive of your recommendation? Timing and context matters.

In the early 80’s, most of the ads were distributed as leaflets or on large bill boards on the most popular places that would catch a lot of attention (like in a market place). With time, in order to reach more people, advertisers started distributing leaflets on streets and with newspaper (surprisingly, a mode of promotion that’s still active). Then came the Television and mass media. Television commercials have continued to dominate the ad space (and by far the most effective) until the point PC became a common household name. Then started the age of digital marketing. Advertisers would promote their products on websites (known as publishers) that were in similar space. In return, they would pay the publishers for hosting their ads. But, most of the times the ads were not very effective as they were not relevant to most. Then came the generation of Googles and Facebooks. And quickly it presented advertisers an opportunity to market their more personalized ads to targeted users, thereby increasing the effectiveness. Platforms like Google and Facebook (and many their companies) acted as aggregators and brought together publishers (who would host an ad space for the platform on their website) and advertisers (who would post their ads on these platforms and the platforms would put relevant contents on the publisher’s ad space). So the magic happened in the platforms who were responsible in deciding what ads would be targeted to which users. Today, with everyone spending hours staring at their smartphones, the online ad industry has quickly become a staggering multi-billion dollar industry. But at what cost?

How targeted ads work

The are four parties involved in the digital advertisement:

Advertisers are the parties who are willing to promote their offerings online
Publishers are those who own the websites or pages. For example, a blogger or a youtube content creator.
Platforms are parties that bring together the advertisers with the users through the publishers
Users are people like you and me who are the targeted audience for the ads

There are so many ways the platforms may serve targeted ads. But most popular among them are:

Pixel tracking: A transparent pixel is placed in a content page and it would transmit information when an event takes place (e.g. user clicks on an ad banner). The platform may use this data to profile the user’s preference.
Cookies: Cookie tracking has been one of the most widely used strategies, and have been very effective, as the tracking happens across multiple user sessions. However, tracking cookies need user’s approval (you may have noticed popups on certain websites asking for user’s consent to track cookies). First-party cookies are intended for the use of the platform, whereas third-party cookies are forwarded to advertisers for their own analysis and profiling.
UTM: UTM’s are based on URLs and mostly used in tracking campaign analytics.

What makes the platforms lethal is that, advertisers who sign up with them, may leverage the user profiles built after gathering information from multiple web pages from across the web. For example, if an advertisers A (an online retailer) and B (a pet insurance) sign up with a platform, they may use data collected by the platform from either websites. So if you have shown interest in purchasing dog food, the pet insurance company might approach you with their offering based on that.¹

Data privacy

This often leads to serious breach on user privacy. One of the infamous example is the Cambridge Analytica data breach from Facebook. Platforms may intentionally sell or may be breached “accidentally”. The result may be catastrophic. In this particular case, the data (based on profiling) was used to influence and mould the result of the US presidential election.²

How to not get tracked?

To some extent, users may use caution and avoid being tracked. But only to certain extent. For example, not giving consent to cookie tracking (although, there might be some cookies that are by default enabled in which case the user doesn’t have a lot of options). Not clicking on ads etc. Using ad-blockers in the browser also helps. But, all this may quickly become overwhelming for some.

Brave browser and BAT

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Brave browser has attracted a lot of eye balls in the recent years. It was developed keeping user privacy at it’s core. It contains ad-blockers built in. Brave also blocks cookie tracking. So, users don’t have to worry about explicitly blocking ads or about cookie consents.

In 2018, a whitepaper was published around the concept of “user attention”, named Basic Attention Token (or BAT). In an effort to improve the security, fairness, and efficiency of digital advertising through the use of blockchain technology, BAT was created by the founder of Mozilla (and Javascript). It is built on top of ethereum, one of the leading cryptocurrencies in the market, only second to Bitcoin. As a result, it contains the features of ethereum like smart-contracts. It is designed to be exchanged between users, advertisers, and publishers. The value of BAT token is positively correlated to the value of ethereum.³

Users may opt to view ads on a separate tab (so that it doesn’t impact the user’s browsing experience). The user’s private data and tracking information is stored only on the user’s device. This ensures animosity and privacy. The browser would match the ads based on the user’s preference. Since it doesn’t need to fetch the user’s profile over internet, it makes it much faster and increases battery life. The advertisers would be paid in BAT tokens based on how much attention the user pays towards their ads. Moreover, the publisher and users would also be paid a certain amount in BAT (although a little, for now anyways). Users may also donate tokens to their favourite publishers (say their favourite bloggers) in BAT. Being almost infinitely divisible, that value may be as little or as large as one can afford (without having to worry about service charges unlike online micro transactions through credit cards).

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Concerns

Although in it’s infancy, BAT has caught huge interest among the developer and DeFi community. An ICO (initial coin offering to distribute BAT among the community) was held in 2017 with an initial offering of token worth 35M USD in value. It was sold out within 30 seconds.⁴ Some buyers opted to buy tokens worth values as high as 4.7M USD.

Now, one of the core fundamentals of any cryptocurrency is decentralization. However, uneven distribution of BAT, it gives those certain buyers the power to control the circulation of these token. Although, if claims are to be believed, the tokens are more evenly distributed across users now (unverified).⁵

Another concern is that BAT is only available with Brave browser. The makers have plans to integrate this offering on other platforms. In fact, BATs can be traded on certain platforms as of today. But, users are almost bound to use brave to be able to perform transactions.

So, why should invest? Well, if you are planning view ads, you might as well get paid for that. You may earn as much as 200 USD every year. Not a bad deal if you ask me.

Barter to Bitcoin – an evolution story

What is money? At hind sight, it’s a piece of paper that can buy you anything from a cup of coffee to a house. But why is money “money”? In other words, why money has to be a unit of transaction? Why does it have a value? Seriously, what’s stopping us from printing shit ton of bills and using them? In order to understand that, we have to go back in time.

Money Vs Currency

Money is an intangible concept. Currency that is a physical (hmm… will come back to it) manifestation of money.¹ When you negotiate with a company about the salary you would draw from your new job, or the money you want to buy a commodity for, you are essentially agreeing upon your value (through your service or otherwise) to the company or about the commodity you are buying.

Earlier, transactions used to happen through barter – a direct trade of services. Barter system had this disadvantage of labelling ground. There was no uniformity in the currencies. For example, I may consider the exchange of an iphone for an expensive watch is more than a fare trade but it might not be a good deal to someone else (the story of a guy trading 10K bitcoins for a couple of pizza is a good read²). So, it became increasingly difficult to reach an agreement and eventually, people moved on to using other currencies that carried more or less similar values to most of the people.

However, it wasn’t always practical to trade items with each other and arranging the items of trade used to be time consuming (imagine waiting for truck full of bricks in the middle of the road while the other party is out there gathering enough salt to trade in exchange). That led to the token based transaction systems (using pieces of metals, cards and then papers) where each token was recognized some some agreed upon value and almost all commodities could be represented in terms of these tokens.

The chinese in 770 B.C. started minting tokens to be used as currency. Later the Asian empire of Lydia, in 600 B.C., started using the first official currency. The chinese had moved to using paper notes by then.

Value of a currency

Currencies as token (notes, coins etc.) enabled countries to do international trade of resources. However, it led to currency wars between countries (on the value of each other’s currency). Higher value of foreign currency meant importing goods from them were expensive (meaning a higher value), whereas lower value meant exporting resources to them would earn them lesser value. Countries weren’t necessarily always on the same page when deciding on the value of each other’s currencies. As a counter measure, the gold standard was devised.

The idea was to peg the value of a currency to the gold reserve (metal that’s scarce so that it can’t be minted/mined at will. Gold happened to be the most traded valuable metal) of it’s treasury. The scarcity of gold would control the currency in circulation. As long as the supply of gold doesn’t increase abruptly, gold reserves remain limited (meaning there is only so much gold in circulation) and the value of currency would remain fairly stable. However, eventually governments drifted away from this approach. Economists cite issues like:

Deflation: Since there is an ever growing need for consumer goods in the market, the demand of commodities keep increasing, and as a result, the supply needs to increase. But since the circulation of money is limited in the economy, the prices of commodities needed to be reduced causing a deflation, which was not a great news for businesses. Some economists consider it an unfair bias against commodity producers.
Instability: Sometimes, inflation is good. By introducing more currencies (minting/printing more money) in the circulation, the government can address major crisis like a recession (or a war). In gold standards, the government’s hand are tied in controlling the circulation of currency, and as a result, it’s cannot control an economic shock.
Hoarding: As gold stocks are limited (due to scarcity) and it’s value going up over time, it might afford more things than what it can afford today. This leads to a common tendency for people to hoard as much gold as much gold as they can. If everyone thinks in this manner, the treasury would soon run out of it’s gold reserve and would have even lesser control on the economy.

Fast forward to today, what decides how valuable a currency (fiat currency)? Broadly categorizing factors are:

Fixed rate: Here a currency’s value is pegged to another foreign currency (USD for example). Imagine we have a currency that is pegged to the US dollar where today 1 unit of USD = 10 units of OurCurrency. If the value of a dollar goes up, that means an equal increase in the value of our currency ( and a devaluation of USD means our currency’s value reduces). On the other hand, if it was not pegged to the USD, it would have remained unchanged, and with the amount of currencies we have, we would be able to afford lesser than what we could have afford a day before in the United states. In contrast, a devaluation of USD would enable us to afford more than we could afford yesterday with the same amount of currencies.³
Floating rate: The demand (in comparison to supply) of a currency in the global currency markets. The more the demand in comparison to supply, the higher the value of currency. For a c
Foreign exchange reserves: the amount of currency held by foreign governments. The more they hold, the lower the supply and the more the value. If the foreign treasury liquidates (sells) it’s reserve of a particular currency, the currency value would crash.⁴

This is why countries can’t keep minting money at will (without crashing the economy due to hyperinflation, Zimbabwe being a recent victim⁵). Or a country cannot liquidate it’s reserve of a foreign currency (without risking it’s own currency value) because it’s not the only country holding that particular currency. There are other countries who hold that currency in their treasury and all those combined determines the value of a currency.

Digital payment

Digital currency is equal in value to an physical currency of the same value. What that means is the salary that is credited to our bank account digitally can be withdrawn by us for an equal amount of physical currency. In the last century, we have become more used to cashless transactions. A lot of economies have embraced digital payments with open arms. Fintech is a common term in the tech industry these days. With the advent of internet, the 21^st century is has seen major tech disruptions. Ordering your meal online is a matter of a few taps on the smart phone and booking a ticket from New York to Berlin has been easier than ever. That called for a need to carry out economic transactions online. Paypal and other similar services have been at the helm of digital payment. Online transactions happen through text messages or scanning QR codes on your phone.

Digital payment have made cash unessential, and to some extent a liability. How many of us remember those days you had to be really careful (and maybe watch your back from time to time) when withdrawing sizable amount of money (currency) from the bank while returning home with the constant fear of getting mugged or robbed. Not anymore! Transferring money to a friend or family member is just a matter of a few API calls and exchanging digital tokens. Money may stay in your bank or in your digital wallets (google, apple, amazon everyone have a wallet of their own with seamless integration with major banks).

Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com

However, digital wallets are not without it’s own problems. For example, what happens if your phone runs out of juice, Or there is a network disruption. Digital payment frauds are at an all time high. A lot of protocols and regulations have been put forward in the last decade, but their effectiveness has been constantly been challenged by hackers and hoarders. Even though digital currencies are all accounted for and leave a trail (good for the government because it takes more effort now to evade tax), that trail may still be erased. Lost money cannot be traced back easily either.

Centralized control

The banks are largely controlled and regulated by the government. Fiat currency is regulated by the banks. In other words, it would have no value if the government or the bank decides to declare them useless from tomorrow (If you think that’s not going to happen, here’s some inspiration). Your online transactions still flow through the bank (controlled by the state). In some way, they are still in control of all your money. In case of a financial crisis or a recession, the government may employ fiscal policies like an expansionary monetary policy to increase the money supply, increase the quantity of loans, reduce interest rates leading to an inflation.⁵ This leads to a decline in our buying capacity. At this point, it starts to feel like the government and the banks have too much power on the money that we so dearly claim as our own.

That paranoid guy in the movies acting all suspicious of the conspiracy theories and the state’s involvement, who doesn’t approve the idea of keeping money in the bank isn’t all too paranoid after all. You can also be sure that in case of a conflict of interest between the government and the people, policies would be made keeping the government’s best interest in focus.

Inflation

The cost of commodities and services rise year on year leading to inflation. On an average, the world economy inflates by around 2%⁶, thereby, reducing purchasing power each passing year. But what causes a global inflation?

An increase in cost of essential raw materials like oil, minerals and natural resource prices may send out a ripple effect and increase cost of commodities.
A surge in demand of products and services. Oil prices generally increase due to increasing demand and reducing supply.
Fiscal policies by government

Keeping all the above in mind, money sitting in the bank account doesn’t sound like a very good idea. Every year, it will depreciate in value. Investing in assets that appreciate over time may be one strategy.

Virtual currency

In 2009, someone using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper on peer-to-peer electronic cash transfer⁷ using block chain technology and named it Bitcoin. Today, Bitcoin has been the poster child of cryptocurrency. To a lot of people, they are one and the same. However, bitcoin is one of the many existing
(albeit the first and the most popular) cryptocurrencies out there in the market. Cryptocurrency uses blockchain technology, which is a decentralized computation technology. It is a virtual currency, meaning there is no physical coinage. Virtual currencies may be used as an alternative to government issued currency and without the involvement of any central authority. Unlike banks (that are centralized institutions controlling fiat currencies), virtual currencies are decentralized and are not managed by one central institution. As a result, service fees are minimal and are not impacted by the price of essential raw materials, keeping economic stability.

How bitcoin works

There are numerous computers running the bitcoin code comprising a network (distributed all over the internet). These computers are called nodes or miners (anyone can choose to be a miner). Each node has access to a public ledger. The public ledger tracks all the transactions (since the first transaction) in a transparent manner. When there is a new transaction, these nodes validate the legitimacy of the transaction. When the list of validated transactions reach a certain size (1MB for bitcoins), they make a “block”. The block is eligible to be appended to the blockchain. But in order to be added to the blockchain, it needs a unique token value (a hash) to be generated using all the transaction details in the block and the address of the previous block (linking this new block to the chain). But coming up with that hash is not a trivial task. Miners need to solve a puzzle to come up with the hash. The first miner (keep in mind that a miner might be a group of computers working together leveraging each other’s compute power) to come up with a hash value (discretionary to the system or network) is rewarded with newly minted currencies and the block is added to the blockchain with the hash value. This process introduces new currencies to the circulation (analogous to government minting notes).

The puzzle solving part is called Proof of work⁸ and is mostly a matter of guessing by generating random hashes that is smaller than or equal to a target hash value defined by the system. The faster and more number of hashes a miner can generate, the better his chances are. Once a miner comes up with a hash that meets the criteria, it is broadcast to the network and all miner nodes validate and vote (in case of a tie to determine the winner) if the value is acceptable (by fitting in the proposed value and based on the values they see in their copy of the ledger). The proof of work is important because this keeps fraudulent transactions from happening. Any tampering with a transaction would result in a different hash value than expected, and would be rejected. In order to perform a scam, the fraudster has to own (or hack into) 51% of the miner nodes. With each passing day, as new miners join the network, it becomes increasingly difficult to do that. This makes the system very secured. Also, the ledger data being public, transparent and immutable in nature makes it possible to track illegal bitcoin transactions.

In order to keep the production of blocks at a stable rate (and not introduce currencies at an arbitrary rate causing devaluation), the complexity or difficulty of generating the hash value for a block increases with the creation of every new block. There are only 21 Million bitcoins to be mined in the bitcoin network and so far (at the time of writing this blog) over 18.65 Million bitcoins have been mined. With every 210,000 blocks being generated (which takes around 4 years on an average), the number of bitcoins rewarded to the miners also halves. According to projections (the way it has been designed), the last bitcoin would be mined in the year 2140. After which, there would be no new bitcoin mining. However, miners could still earn bitcoins as processing fees from the transactions they validate.

Bitcoin value

Even though Bitcoin is not a legal tender (it is not recognized as a valid currency for transaction) by most governments, it has gained a lot of traction over the last couple of years. When bitcoin came into existence in 2009, it had no value. But today, bitcoin value has been at an all time high peaking at more than 50K USD. In 2009, mining bitcoins were easy and miners were awarded 50 BTCs. That value has touch 6.25 now. It will be halved even further to 3.125 in the future. However, the rising value of bitcoin brings a lot of incentives for the miners even today. One successful mining and you earn (6.25 * 50,000 USD) around 312,500 USD.

With each passing day the world is becoming more accepting towards the concept of cryptocurrency, to an extent that some governments are being forced to consider it as a legal medium of transaction. And it may happen sooner than we think. However, which government pioneers and makes a mark on the crypto landscape remains to be speculated. Till then, keep your wallets safe!

The Reactive Future

Human nature has been reactive since the beginning of time.

If there is there is a need to travel farther and without necessarily indulging into too much inconvenience, we invent machines (read steam engine, cars, trains and the likes).

When there isn’t enough land space for new construction, we cut forests.

When we needed certain people to pay for our failures, we built up social structures and hierarchy.

Today, if we don’t want to avoid the inconvenience of going to a restaurant and pick up a couple of burritos and a bottle of wine, we order online (because why not, it’s so convenient).

When there is a heartbreak that even friends and family can’t fathom, we fallback on iTunes and spotify (so what if they cost an awful lot).

If this, then that.
When there is an event, there is an action, rather, a reaction.

And that’s what we will discuss today. How the concept of IFTTT (if this then that) has emerged as a requirement today. It’s so much ingrained into our psyche, that we don’t pay active attention to them anymore.

This concept has been brilliantly transformed by some into a digital platform. One such initiative has resulted in a platform like IFTTT (This is not a sponsored post, there are other competitors who are probably as good).

Our never ending needs to showcase our private lives on social media has led to requirements like “If I order take a selfie where I look attractive, then share that selfie on Instagram” (because “no one” should look better than me on my IG photos) or “When I order a pizza from Domino’s, why not share it on Facebook” (how else would you create the illusion of a happening life?).

However, there are some boring (and not so useful) cases as well. For example, “Notify me on my phone (by a text message) when my flight gets delayed” or “Switch off the lights automatically when you are not home” or “When the door lock unlocks, turn the central heating ON“.

IoT and API integration

The concept of IFTTT resonates well with this connected age of everything as a service. Our lives are event driven and all actions are API driven. Assembling all third party API’s at one place and providing an intuitive user interface can give users the power to integrate all the technologies in our lives together. Without being tech-savvy.

The use cases may be expanded into so use-cases that are only limited by human imagination. Imagine having the power to “Cover your crops before a frost” or “Automatically start charging your electric car as soon as your morning alarm goes off so that you are ready for your morning commute to work“. There are many such applications. There are many such cool ideas that may be possible to achieve by leveraging such platforms. (If you are really interested, here is one such post that I stumbled upon).

As we progress through the 21st century, the abundance of technology in our lives surmounts. The digital age is the age of connectivity and the future is reactive.

Wisdom in a box

Welcome to the future.
Think. Apply. Transform.

Wisdombox a.k.a wsdmbox is a platform to voice opinion, encourage thinking by creating meaningful contents, asking questions and sharing experiences to raise our collective wisdom that would create awareness, have a long term positive impact on the society and encourage us to take necessary action towards a better future.